


the bright blessed day, the dark sacred night

by Regency



Category: Holby City
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Berena Secret Santa (Holby City), Berena Secret Santa 2020 (Holby City), Bernie Wolfe Lives, Christmas, Domestic Fluff, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, Fix-It, France (Country), Kids Say the Darnedest Things, Look at those gay marrieds, Permanent Injury
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-20
Updated: 2020-12-20
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:47:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,352
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28193436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Regency/pseuds/Regency
Summary: Canon divergent AU. Bernie and Serena face an uncertain future that's brighter because they're together.
Relationships: Serena Campbell/Bernie Wolfe
Comments: 12
Kudos: 57
Collections: Berena Secret Santa 2020





	the bright blessed day, the dark sacred night

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ktlsyrtis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ktlsyrtis/gifts).



> For Jess who is the best and who I adore. While this is somewhat angstier than I intended, I hope it's still enjoyable for you. And thank you to Wonko for organizing all this!
> 
> Prompt: Christmas in France
> 
> All vibes. Plot who? Title from Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World."

Christmas Eve in France wound down softly, as opposed to the day that had begun early and run harder and faster than Guinevere on a sugar high from all the Christmas biscuits her favorite grand-auntie had snuck her. _Bernie’s going to be paying for that_ , Serena thought fondly of her partner who sat tucked in the wingback chair in front of the burning fireplace with their grandniece in her arms. Bernie was valiantly juggling a drowsing Gwen and a tattered copy of _Night Before Christmas._ The little girl had demanded to have the story read to her again. She’d made the rounds of all the adults until she decided it was Bernie who read them best. This was Bernie’s third time and despite her drooping eyelids, Gwen was no less enthralled in the telling.

Serena crossed the cozy den to right her grandniece before she could slip off Bernie’s lap into a startled puddle on the floor.

“I think it’s time for certain little girls to get ready for bed. Wouldn’t want Santa to think he’s put you on the wrong list, would we?”

Guinevere looked worriedly at Bernie. “He wouldn’t, would he?”

Serena and Bernie shared a look of fond amusement.

“No need to worry, I’ll put in a good word for you,” Bernie promised.

“Thank you, Auntie Bernie!” Gwen threw herself at Bernie for one last hug. Bernie hid her wince well and returned it. Serena repressed her grimace. Bernie would be paying for that as well. Survival was anything but free. She pressed a hand to Bernie’s shoulder to discourage her from getting up. Lovely though France was this time of year, the biting cold was murder on aching bones.

“Auntie Serena, will you help me pick out my Christmas dress for tomorrow?”

Gwen swung Serena’s hand in hers on the walk through the chalet to the guest suite Gwen was sharing with her parents.

“Only if your mum doesn’t mind. I know she brought several for you to choose from.” Greta planned for all eventualities; that hadn’t changed in the years since Serena had given up Holby City for a French chalet and a medically retired army major of a wife.

“She said it was all right! I asked permission first. Please, Auntie! I like the colors you pick. I want to wear something special to the Le Réveillon.” Gwen had soaked up French and all the French Christmas traditions like a sponge each year her parents had brought her to visit Serena in the French countryside. The food, the songs and sites, the sweets at the Christmas Markets. She was more of a native than either Serena or Bernie this time of year. With any luck, her soon-to-be born sibling would visit regularly enough to have the same experience.

“Then, of course I’ll help you pick. But we’ll have to be very quiet. I know mummy is tired with the new baby on the way.” Gwen got a peculiar look on her face that reminded Serena piercingly of Elinor. “Auntie Serena, I know mummy has a baby in her tummy, but how did it get there. I asked daddy, but he said I should ask you because you’re a doctor and doctors have the most accurate information.”

Serena reached into her deep and muddled memory for the Talk and how she must have explained it to Ellie when she was too young to understand medical terminology or the language of desire. _Thank you for this, Jason. You couldn’t have redirected her to Bernie?_ She’d have some words for her sleeping nephew come morning time.

“Well, sweetheart, when two people like each other very much—two people who are physically compatible, that is—they can do things, very adult things, that create a baby.”

“That must mean mummy and daddy did Adult Things to make Baby Ida.” Serena could already envision Bernie’s raised eyebrows at the perceptible uppercase lettering.

“Yes, I suppose it does.”

Gwen blinked up at her in her typical owlish fashion. Like her parents, she was unencumbered by a need to fill silence. They continued through the house companionably, hands swinging idly between them.

“Auntie Serena, are you going to have a baby?”

Serena paused between one step and the next, her foot hovering uncertainly above the ground. She only dropped it when her knee began to complain.

“Darling, what on earth makes you ask that?”

“You and Auntie Bernie like each other very much, don’t you?”

“Very very much, but I daresay your aunties’ baby-making days are well behind us.”

“Then why do you do Adult Things so much if you can’t make babies?” 

It was on the tip of Serena’s tongue to ask just _how_ her grandniece knew often she and Bernie got up to Adult Things when a honking laugh interrupted what was becoming easily the most awkward exchange of Serena’s fifty-odd years. She turned to see Bernie propped against a convenient side table to keep herself upright. She refused to use her cane inside the house, only relenting outdoors in deference to the icy conditions.

“I’m glad one of us is having fun. Maybe you’d like to explain to our grandniece why we aren’t having a baby.”

Bernie joined them outside the suite of rooms shared by Jason’s growing family. She petted Gwen’s plaited hair in gentle affection. “Your auntie and I have had our babies and we’ve loved them very much. It’s time for other people to have them now, like your mummy and daddy. Then we get to spoil you and love you and send you right to bed.” It was no less true for all the Fletchlings and Donna’s two, plus Charlotte and Morven’s one when they made the trip from Jamaica. They were getting a reputation as grand aunties to watch out for.

Gwen’s pensive expression lightened in revelation. “Does that mean I’m your baby?”

Bernie looked to Serena uncertainly. Child logic could be difficult to combat if you were out of the habit. Serena came to her rescue. All her years babysitting the Fletchlings were coming in handy.

“You’re our grandniece, Gwen. You’re definitely one of our babies.” She kissed the girl’s hair and waited while Bernie bent down painstakingly to do the same. “And on that note, I think we ought to get you into bed. The dress will have to wait till morning. And no pouting. I’ve outmatched much better pouters than you in my sleep.”

“Auntie, nooo.”

“Auntie, yess, and don’t bother asking Auntie Bernie, she’ll side with me.” Serena shot her wife a warning look before the other woman could make a case for keeping Gwen up a little longer. Greta would already be cross she’d been up this long. It was well past her scheduled bedtime. Bernie liked to indulge her; she was a soft touch.

“Er, yes, exactly. Listen to your Auntie Serena. She knows best.”

“Smart woman.”

When Serena returned from reading Gwen a chapter out of _Black Beauty_ after getting the girl into her pajamas, Bernie was still in the process of shedding the day’s clothes in the master bedroom. Progress was slow as it was painful, it seemed. Lines of undermedicated agony had etched themselves on her face as grief had done on Serena, except Serena’s didn’t fade. Serena waited at the door for Bernie to catch her breath after another fruitless effort to undress. She was clutching at the hem of her undershirt, its black fabric in sharp relief to the shiny reddish hue of her new spinal surgical scar. Serena could name precisely which vertebrae had been fused to stabilize Bernie’s spine and knew by heart where every set of rods and screws had been inserted into Bernie’s body so that she might walk and sit and stand. Whatever the pain those actions elicited.

“Care for a hand?” It wouldn’t do to presume. Bernie was pride itself; too much had been taken from her for Serena to rob her of a second of her independence. Her hands still itched to soothe Bernie’s pain when she’d let her, but first she had to ask.

“Just give me a minute.” Bernie’s voice was as pinched as her expression, a sure sign for the other woman to cease and disist.

“All right. I’ll lock up.” Serena took her time securing the windows and doors. Time enough that Bernie might have recovered her composure yet not too long that she’d be left to wait unduly if she was in distress. The balance between being everything she wanted to be for Bernie and only what Bernie needed was one Serena was still learning, two years into their marriage.

Bernie had come back to Serena near death, but she had come back. Nobody Serena had ever loved had come back. She had decided then that she wouldn’t be letting this magnificent woman go. Unbeknownst to her, Bernie had been harboring similar ideas.

They’d been married in the hospital by the same vicar who’d officiated Greta and Jason’s wedding. Somehow, she hadn’t been surprised to find they’d chosen each other in the end, after all.

Serena return to find Bernie out of her undershirt, hunched over her knees. She was breathing rapidly and covered in a fine sheen of perspiration that darkened the hair at her temples. Serena acted immediately: she grabbed Bernie’s strongest prescribed pain medication and a glass of water from the en suite. Bernie would have gotten it herself if she could move.

She sat by Bernie’s side holding one of her hands in a comforting grip, massaging her metacarpals the way Bernie did hers after a long surgery. In all her injuries, Bernie’s hands had been spared, and yet they almost seemed to ache more in sympathy for all the rest of her left bruised, scarred.

“God, I wish I didn’t feel like this,” Bernie said a while later, once the medication had eased the worst of what she was going through. It might have been an hour for all that Serena watched the clock. She judged time passing by Bernie’s shoulders dropping, a soft hiss of relief issuing from her lips. The sweat of futile effort on her brow had cooled dry, her flush had paled. They both breathed easier.

“I know.” Serena had weathered the days when Bernie wasn’t sure she’d survive this—not the injuries themselves, the consequences of them. She’d known Bernie would. Nothing else was acceptable. That hadn’t changed. Group therapy, couples therapy, individual therapy. They’d done it all. If necessary, she’d go through it again. It had only been Serena having her world blown to hell to remind her what, who, was essential.

“Sometimes, I don’t feel like me anymore. I wanted to carry Gwen to bed and I can’t even do that.” Serena kissed her bare shoulder. Serena loved each part of her, no matter how changed. The woman she was at heart, under rods and screws and steel plates, was the real Bernie and that woman was the same.

“That isn’t out of the cards for you. The physiotherapist told us it would be a long road to recovery, darling.”

“I thought it would be shorter.”

Serena arched a brow at her wife’s downturned head. Bernie refused to look at her during her setbacks, as though sure she’d see a rejection of who she was instead of love for it. “You thought you could take shortcuts.” Bernie hadn’t given herself adequate time to recover the first time she’d been caught in an explosion, either.

Bernie laughed and the knot of tension in Serena’s chest loosened fractionally. “I guess I did.” She sighed, started to toe off her ankle boots more easily than her blouse and undershirt had gone. Less painfully. “I always thought my body would take care of me.”

“It did, Bernie. It saved you.” Serena stopped her wife undressing to kiss the side of her head. “This thick skull saved you when your helmet wasn’t enough to repel that bomb blast.” She rubbed a hand up and down Bernie’s right arm where screws stabilized her mostly healed ulna and radius. “These sturdy bones saved you when you tac vest couldn’t repel flying shrapnel.” She traced the scarred path on Bernie’s back, bare in the soft sports bra she wore. Bernie shivered. “This steel spine held you together so you could come home before the surgeons ever got to you. Your body’s done everything it was supposed to do. It took care of you, but you have to return the favor now.”

“No more bombs?” she asked mock sullenly. The playfulness in her voice was back in force. Serena had got through to her.

“And no more canons or bayonets. No more wars. Not the kind you fight on battlefields.”

A year after her separation from RAMC had become official, that was something Bernie was still coming to terms with. She had been a soldier once. She had resigned first by choice and then been discharged by necessity. All she had wanted was a choice, and in the end, there hadn’t been one for her to make. Only someone else’s to accept.

“You have choices, maybe not the ones you wanted, but you have them. Because you lived. Just keep remembering that.”

Bernie ducked her head, contrite.

“I do. The pain makes it hard to see sometimes but I see it.” She looked at Serena, really looked at her as she only did when they were completely alone, just themselves and this inexorable draw between them inseverable by life or death. Bernie looked at Serena as if on some level this final immeasurable loss was worth it to end up here in France on Christmas Eve, married to Serena, all these years later. _Greta had got the right of it, after all._ “I see you. I always see you, Serena Campbell.”

Serena framed her face and kissed her underneath the gauzy canopy of their four-poster bed as though the room were full of mistletoe instead of melting candles and dogeared medical journals and laundry neither had got ‘round to washing since guests had come.

“I’ll always see you too.”

**Author's Note:**

> I'm very small and I have no money, so you can imagine the stress I'm under.


End file.
